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28 May 2013

The Weakest Link

Spain in the Circuit
of European Capital

PAH protester: "I don't fit into your law."

An elder woman with a
yard-long wooden spoon stirs a huge pan of paella bubbling over a
ring of blue flame. Wine bottles pop, music pulses from the
loudspeakers and the neighborhood gathers around long tables set up
in the street. Today – May 18, 2013 – eleven families are
celebrating their departure from the squatted building where they’ve
spent the last eighteen months. The bank that owns it, Caixa
Catalunya, has been forced into granting them five-year leases in
other homes left empty by the crisis. This is a major victory for the
Platform of People Affected by Foreclosures, known as the PAH
(Plataforma de afectados por hipotecas). For the first time, they are
rehousing people at a “social rent” of 150 euros per month. It’s
a benchmark. The idea is to create new rights from the ground
up, in defiance of rapacious economic practice and repressive
legislation.

In a country with 27%
unemployment, two million vacant housing units and a foreclosure rate
of some five hundred per day, the PAH is a rising political force.
According to recent national polls, an overwhelming majority finds it
more competent to resolve the housing crisis than either of the two
main parties, the conservative PP and the pseudo-socialist PSOE,
whose ratings have fallen to historic lows. Here as in the rest of
Southern Europe, the popping of the real-estate bubble led to a
banking collapse, government bailouts, the specter of national
insolvency, European rescues, a flood-tide of austerity measures and
finally, a deep crisis of legitimacy affecting the entire political
mainstream. How that all happened is a revealing bit of history. What
happens next could change the course of the global capitalist system.

Two young Marxists from
Madrid, Isidro López and Emmanuel Rodríguez, offer the most
convincing account of recent Spanish economic history in their book
Fin de Ciclo (End of Cycle). Under the Franco dictatorship,
without unions or even a free work force, Fordist-type manufacturing
never attained the dynamic expansionism of the postwar “economic
wonder.” Coastal tourism plugged the gap, installing the
construction industry as a major sector of the economy and
prefiguring Spain’s future place in the European division of labor.
After the 1970s transition to democracy, an initial housing bubble
inflated in the 1980s and burst in the early 1990s. From 1995 onward
it was followed by a tremendous influx of European capital, “hot
money” at cheap interest rates afforded by membership in the single
currency. Industry was all but abandoned and the country’s export
deficit began to grow, finally reaching a staggering 10% in 2008. As
part of the same contradictory process, Spain’s annual GDP growth
surged above 4% (which is a little miracle for a developed Western European
economy) and both political parties abased themselves in the rush to
pass de-zoning laws and facilitate massive construction, driven ahead
by the beachfront economy in Málaga and Marbella, the creative city model in
Barcelona, or the financial wealth-effects that deluged over Madrid.
Behind the mirage of the “knowledge based economy” were Northern
tourists hungry for sex and sun, and structured finance traders
pumping up the algorithms of earthly paradise.

Cruise ship landing in Málaga

During the peak years
more housing units were built in Spain than in France, Germany and
the UK combined. What you can see across the country is an ecological
disaster. More territory was artificialized from 1986 to 2007 than
had been from the Neolithic era to the mid-1980s. Employment
broadened and salaries rose, while the state used tax revenues for an
infrastructure splurge: highways, trains, airports, etc. Credit
schemes reached deep into the population: fully 87% of households
were the nominal “owners” of their dwelling before the bubble
burst. Yet many of these new borrowers were precarious workers in the
service and construction sectors. Their mortgages were bundled into
collateralized debt obligations, just as in the US. However, Spanish
finance does not enjoy all the imperial privileges: the riskiest and
most profitable tranches were not palmed off on the global markets,
but instead left to rot on the books of the semi-public provincial
savings banks, or Cajas de Ahorro, which began their slow collapse
amid the international credit crunch of 2008.

Bust follows boom, just
like clockwork. First came the bank failures, the government bailouts
and the concentration of the credit sector, including the merger of
seven Cajas into a mastodon called Bankia (nationalized one year
after its foundation in 2011). After that came the dramatic upward
climb of interest rates on government bonds as speculators started
manoeuvering for a possible kill (ie, a Spanish exit from the
Eurozone). On June 9, 2012, panicked Eurogroup negotiators forced the
Partido Popular into a restructuring deal in exchange for a 100
billion-euro credit line. A month later, on July 26, the new European
Central Bank head Mario Draghi announced that the ECB would purchase
government bonds from member states in whatever quantity necessary.
The speculators backed off, and at that point the crisis left the
realm of finance and became thoroughly political.

Austerity is the
code-name for a governmental operation that shifts the costs of
financial breakdown onto national populations, with the aim of
destroying redistribution programs and restructuring public
institutions such as health care, education and retirement programs.
It is carried out with the aim of restoring asset values in the eyes
of international investors, chiefly by reducing wage levels and
public deficits. In Spain, austerity has taken the form of multiple
tax hikes, public-sector pay cuts and layoffs, stark reductions of
services and the maintenance of a century-old mortgage law that
leaves debtors bound to repayment even after repossession of the home
by the bank. Despite widespread warnings of the downward spiral that
such cuts will inevitably bring, the German political-economic elite
and the Partido Popular have forged a kind of sadistic alliance in
the demand for further austerity measures. On the Spanish side this
punishing stance is exacerbated by neoconservative moralism,
including harsh police repression of protesters and a recent abortion
law pushing women back to coat-hanger days. Meanwhile, every effort
is made to re-inflate the
construction-finance complex, particularly now as tourism kicks up with
the return of stock-market profits and wealth-effects in Northern
Europe. This strategy is generally seen as a last-ditch effort to
advance the corporate conservative agenda as far as possible during
the PP’s remaining two years in power (the party’s radical
decline in the polls making reelection almost inconceivable). The
goal would be to leave the population hopeless, impoverished and
exhausted, as seems to be the case in Greece. Yet the irrational
severity of some measures suggests there might be an even more
sinister aim: forcing a violent confrontation in order to impose an
authoritarian solution.

The Spanish left is on
its feet, presenting clear threats to neoconservative policies. The
Indignado movement – more commonly known as 15-M, for its starting
date on May 15 – was able to last the entire summer of 2011, before
deciding on its own dissolution into neighborhood committees. The
movement built on the mobilizing capacities inherited from the
alterglobalization activism of the early 2000s, with its hacklabs,
no-border camps and autonomous organizing of the precarious
workforce. But now there was something new: a collapsing middle class
that discovered the informational and organizational potentials of
the Internet even as it lost much of what formerly defined its social
status (financial assets, professional job security, high-end state
entitlements). The occupied plazas and encampments saw the birth of a
new political generation, which is a community of fate, debate and
proposition, and not an age-category. The emergence of a vast
embodied movement from that invisible labyrinth of rants, feelings,
desires, snippets of information and philosophical discourse known as
Web 2.0 brought the word and the reality of technopolitics to
the forefront of the protest movement, along with the famous hashtag
#spanishrevolution.

There were plenty of
urgent questions to debate out in the streets two years ago, and there are even more today.
Widespread proletarianization is still partially masked by family support
networks and the usual reluctance of the middle classes to admit how
close they are to the precarious, the unemployed and the excluded.
And yet precarization and outright proletarianization is hitting
millions of people, just as it is in the US. The explosive popularity
of the PAH housing activists – including large numbers of Latin
Americans and other immigrants who stand directly against the racism
of the far right – is part of the aftermath of 15-M. So was the
impressive encirclement of the Congress building in Madrid last
September 25, an initially non-violent action which saw intense
police repression as the government hysterically denounced an
attempted coup by “anti-system” forces. More recently, large
concentrations of citizens in support of public education and
health-care services, known as mareas or “tides,” have begun appearing in
urban centers. These protesters are not the usual suspects, but
instead embrace a wide range of the population shocked by the naked
corruption of the elites, and directly threatened by it as well. The
likelihood of future mass uprisings? Under current conditions,
they’re almost certain.

Madrid 25-S: "Spaniards, the constitution has died."

Since the encircling of
the Congress, and in many cases, since 15-M, Spanish intellectuals on
the left are talking openly about a double movement of destitution / constitution. Their aim is to topple the existing two-party
system and transform the very fundaments of the democracy inherited from
the 1970s. As the PP and the equally corrupt PSOE hit their nadir in
the polls, a plethora of new splinter parties has arisen. The former
communists – now called Izquierda Unida – are gaining broader
popular support thanks to the straight-talking of Alberto Garzón,
who at 27 is the youngest serving representative in the current
Congress. If the cutbacks continue with their current ferocity, as
everything currently indicates they will, then an electoral shift
seems overwhelmingly likely, in which even a partial union of forces
would bring a left coalition to power. The whole problem is knowing
what to do with that power, and knowing how to keep it from becoming a mere
simulacrum.

The failure of the
left-wing Syriza party to form a government in
Greece last year makes it clear that despite the punishments of austerity, a
majority will chose to remain within Europe – while powerful
outside forces will proclaim that any left opposition must necessarily
lead to breakup. It’s true that the consequences of a Spanish exit
from the Eurozone would sweep across the global capitalist system.
Already weakened French and German banks together hold almost 50% of
Spain’s foreign debt, which is far larger than that of Greece. It
is widely believed that the collapse of the French and German banking
sectors would bring on a full-fledged global depression. Yet nothing
can prevent a determined political force in a country as large as
Spain from refusing the EU austerity measures and forcing radically
different negotiations. If framed and timed correctly, as Isidro
López argues, this threat to the neoliberal status quo in Europe
could win the adhesion of the other Southern member states, as well
as France and Ireland. This is the paradox of the European Union
today: only the threat of exit makes any kind of “voice” – that
is, real political negotiation – even remotely possible. And only
such a threat, at the EU level, can give substance to the strategy of
destitution/constitution currently being explored at the national
level in Spain.

“YO NO ENTRO EN TU
LEY” reads the sign held by a PAH protester in Barcelona. “I
don’t fit into your law.” By creating radical facts on the
ground in the form of occupations, collectively negotiated social rents
and massive tides of protest coordinated by sophisticated
technopolitical networks, while simultaneously mobilizing both
electoral forces and a guiding philosophy for the seizure and use of
institutional power, the Spanish left is rediscovering the almost
forgotten and seemingly archaic concept of autonomy. Autonomy
is neither a right nor an essence nor even a persistent condition,
but instead, the endless process whereby the collective self (autos)
creates its own law (nomos). In this case it entails creating new social rights – ones that are based, not on social property as under the welfare state, but instead on a theorization of commons – as well as original forms of critical participation using technopolitical means to ensure that government is not hijacked by interest groups. For sure, this emergent process
of autonomization is only made possible by the stark heteronomy of
capital’s resurgent law of accumulation, which concentrates wealth
among a few while imposing proletarianization on the many. In our
time, political autonomy is a fruit that can only be plucked from a
toxic desert. Yet these are the chances of human existence, singular
and accidental, without any guarantees.

Obviously nothing
concrete has yet been achieved. Obviously this is a desperate
confrontation where the weaker side – our side – can
easily lose. And just as obviously, the entire scenario described
here could be annulled by the controlled drawdown of austerity, the
stimulus of a few exclusive profit centers (bricks and mortar, again)
and the stifling return to the status
quo of a failed but immensely powerful system. Obviously we
can all just stagger on like zombies greeting the everlasting dawn of the
dead. But for anyone who wants out of the endless rerun of finance
capitalism, the Spanish left – the weakest link in the circuit of
European capital – is once again a radical force that deserves your
active attention and your living support.

thanx a million brian for your text!! i'm about to read it anxiously ;-) we are all very thankful here for your very productive visit, and for all your marvellous interventions in barcelona, madrid and málaga - lets make a spanish translation/adaptation of this text asap ok?? so that it can be read and discussed over here - besides, you might like to know: emmanuel's new book (hipótesis democracia) has just been published http://www.traficantes.net/index.php/editorial/catalogo/coleccion_mapas/Hipotesis-Democracia.-Quince-tesis-para-la-revolucion-anunciada and it's becoming quikly an extraordinary movement microevent - will keep you updated of course... - BIG HUGS!!! SEGUIMOS, SÍ SE PUEDE!!! / marcelo /

just finished reading it. i know you for nearly 20 years and i'm every time amazed by your capacity to understand and make simple but sophisticated narrations of complex situations. apart from that, i feel very moved. things over here are getting every time worse. still you are right: we have hope out of rage. thanx for your help, amigo y compañero! sí se puede! this time we are gonna win / marcelo /